Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/129

 sincerity. That is the wise policy. That is the necessary policy. Those who wish for peace, but who by announcing inevitable conflicts create the vertigo of war, enervate and upset by secret contradictions the reason of the country. And they take away from France the benefit of absolute clearness, clearness for others and clearness for herself, which is a safeguard for her and for all the world."

But one thing may be worse, he feels, than war, and that is, the condition of the world under an armed peace—such an armed peace as existed all through the latter part of Jaurès' life. For armed peace combines all the evils of war—hatred, moral uncertainty, the twilight of intrigue and doubt, all the base passions, with none of those redeeming features which Jaurès saw in war. "If we have a horror of war," he says, "it is not from a feeble and enervated sentimentalism.… If sufferings are a necessary condition of a great human step in advance, the revolutionary can resign himself to them." And he speaks with admiration of that state of mind which comes from the "great probability of near peril, the certainty of imminent sacrifice, the frequent familiarity with death joyfully accepted." Such fruits of war he did not despise. But he seriously warns those who talk lightly of the good that is bound to spring from war. In 1905